The Foxes Guarding the Henhouses

By: Guest Authors

By Richard Geno

If there was ever a case of having the foxes guarding the henhouses, it is now. The first round of this weird practice came this fall when it became clear that the financial world was being rocked by all of the home loans made in the past several years to millions of people who should not have been loaned money for houses in the first place. This was done under the auspices of a law passed during the Carter administration, and promoted heavily during the Clinton administration – the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977.

When the Bush administration warned of the problems with Fannie Mae back in 2001, it was Barney Frank and Maxine Waters who came to its defense. Frank and Waters strongly defended Franklin Raines who ran Fannie Mae into the ground, escaping with bonuses of over $90 million. Now, it is Barney Frank and Maxine Waters who are leading the offensive on the financial crisis. Maxine slipped up recently by indicating that she was going to “socialize” the oil industry.

Then, there is the electoral process itself where the recipients of government doles have the opportunity to elect someone who promises more government doles. This is the classic case of setting up a system where you can rob from Peter to pay Paul, therefore always counting on the support of Paul. Barack Obama tried to expand that philosophy to virtually everyone by lying about the fact that he was going to offer a tax cut to 95% of the population. If you confiscated 100% of the income of the top 5%, you would not have enough money to pay for Obama’s obscene $3.6 Trillion budget.

During the election campaign, the Assocication of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was investigated in fourteen states for voter fraud and massive registration irregularities. Fast forward to February, 2009; and we find that this very same ACORN will be participating in the 2010 United States Census in an effort to recruit 1.4 million people to “count” the number of citizens in the United States. This group was also a large beneficiary of the Obama “stimulus” package.

Recently, there has been a big deal made of the AIG bonuses. Guess who were the two biggest recipients of political contributions from AIG last year? Senators Christopher Dodd and Barack Obama. Senator Dodd is the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. He was also personally involved with the key legislative changes that paved the way for AIG to pay the bonuses. Now, Senator Dodd is in charge of holding hearings on the AIG bonuses.

Perhaps the most significant case of the fox guarding the henhouse is the Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, an admitted tax cheat, who is the head of the Internal Revenue Service. The beat goes on with Charles Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, who faces mushrooming ethics and tax irregularities. The Ways and Means Committee is charged with writing tax legislation for the rest of us.

Presiding over all of this is someone with no experience of managing anything but a teleprompter, President Obama. He has moved the rather modest, by comparison, Bush administration deficits of $250-300 billion to $1.8 trillion. Winston Churchill summed up Obama’s plans quite succinctly, ” I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”

There are so many metaphors that describe what we are facing – from the “blind leading the blind” to each of the aforementioned “foxes guarding the henhouses.” Who is the biggest culprit of all of this misguided leadership? The national mainstream media, who had no curiosity about Barack Obama’s shady background, his close relationships with Communists and anti-American radicals, or his complete lack of management experience, is derelict.

The leaders of the mainstream media are the reason we have the Obamas, Geithners, Rangels, Waters, Franks, Dodds and ACORNs dictating to those who have built this country and to its taxpayers what should be done in the real world when none of them have ever done anything in the real world.